Monday

T H E I R A S C I B L E S

I fight in myself any tendency to accept a fixed, sensuously appealing, recognisable style... I am always trying to paint my way out of and beyond facile, doctrine idiom. I do not want other artists to imitate my work - they do even when I tell them not to - but only my example for freedom and independence from all external, decadent, and corrupting influences.

In 1950, twenty-eight of the most prominent artists in the united states signed an open letter to the president of the metropolitan museum of art protesting a juried exhibition intended to increase the museum's collection of contemporary art. The letter accused director FRANCIS HENRY TAYLOR and curator ROBERT BEVERLY, of loading the jury with critics hostile to "advanced art," particularly abstract expressionism. NINA LEEN brought fourteen of the signatories together for a photograph that came to be dubbed the IRASCIBLES. Detractors considered the protest typical avant-garde posturing, but it proved to be only one of many quarrels that the metropolitan would face over the ensuing two decades about how to update its permanent collection.